The pavement ant Tetramorium caespitum wages huge battles on sidewalks,
apparently to establish territorial foraging boundaries for the season.
We used empirical data to create a model of where these boundaries will
develop as a function of the recruitment strategies of the ants. Larger
colonies gain disproportionately large territories, leading to a scaling
relationship of colony size with territory size with a slope that can be
estimated analytically and which depends in counterintuitive ways on
ecological conditions and the strength of recruitment.